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Wednesday, August 1, 2018

No Lines Fairy

This month, I thought I would ink up one of my favourite fairies; Whimsy Stamps Mazarine Fairy.

I have coloured her many times already, I just adore her. Because I've coloured her so often, I wanted to push myself to do something different with her.

I've already coloured her with 'out of my comfort zone' colours. I've coloured her as a redhead. I've coloured her with No Lines.

So, what should I do this time? I decided to go with a darker skin tone than I would normally reach for and I have also used the No Lines Technique.

I have taken photos at each stage of the process to show it is not as scary as it sounds!

Are you ready? Let's go...

I started with the skin first. Normally I would colour lighter areas before darker areas so I don't pull any of the darker colours into the lighter colours.

As these were different colours for me, I wanted to play around with them before I did other things on the image - If I decided I didn't like how the skin came out, I wouldn't be grumpy about wasting time, or discarding something with a different area I felt I had coloured well.

I used a pencil to mark the pupils and drew in a space for the eyes so I didn't lose them once I started colouring.

I coloured the skin dark to light, using E47, E74, E71, E70 with a very, very gentle and quick swipe with E00.

Next I coloured the hair, light to dark, using N3, N5, N7 and N9.

Time to colour the wings using the Feathering Technique. Again, because these are lighter colours I would have coloured these before the hair. But, I wanted to check the hair and skin were working together before I moved on.

I used BG0000, BG10, RV000 and RV10.

Next I moved onto her dress. On this area, I laid down a medium colour first to plan where my shading was going to be. Then I stepped up to my dark colour and worked down to the lightest.

I used; YG01, YG03, YG01, YG00.

For the underneath of the skirt, I coloured dark to light, using W5, W3 and YG03.

I wanted to ground the image before I moved onto the shoes. On this occasion, I went light to dark, using W0, W1 and W3. I also used these colours to add a little shading to the whites of the eyes.

Next I accesorised! I gave her a pink hairband, belt and shoes, colouring from dark to light, using W3, R81, RV10 and RV000.

Time for the goggle bongers! That's the boingy pom poms on her headband. This time I went from light to dark, using BG000, BG10, BG11 and BG53 along with YG00, YG01 and YG03.

Next I worked on her fairy wand, colouring dark to light, using Y18, Y13, Y04 and Y11.

Have you noticed how I mix things up? Sometimes I colour light to dark and sometimes I colour dark to light. I have found I get better results by laying down the colour in different ways, depending on the area I am colouring and the technique I am using.

Don't be afraid to try this - there are no rules - do what works for you :)

Finally I coloured her eyes. I decided to go in with pencil because it was such a small area to deal with and I didn't want to ruin everything I had done before. You could be sure this would be the moment when my hand would slip or a marker decided to blob!